ABSTRACT
The proximity between scientific and psychic phenomena is one that Butts, with her preoccupation with mysticism, prioritises in her fiction. Her associations were encouraged, most significantly, by her acquaintance with ‘scientific journalist and deputy editor of the Athenaeum’, J. W. N. Sullivan, ‘a man well placed to mediate between the arts and sciences’. 1 Sullivan remarks on ‘the realisation, evoked by scientific study, of the mystery of the universe and of the multitudinous possibilities that lie, as it were, dormant within it’. 2 According to Sullivan, the ‘range and freedom of imagination necessary to create theories that shall be adequate to this mysterious universe is certainly not generally recognised’, and he gives the non-Euclidean geometries as an example of ‘the extraordinary imaginative freedom that is required in modern science’. 3 Butts was responsive to Sullivan’s remarks on freedom and quick to understand his comments as benign to alternative (perhaps mystical) ways of interpreting natural phenomena. And indeed, he makes his tolerance explicit in the last sentence of his book Bases of Modern Science (1928): ‘it is even possible that they [aesthetic and religious experiences] will not always remain excluded from the scientific scheme’. 4
